Around the house has been uneventful and quiet. It’s been enjoyable, though we’ve had our usual summer errands and engagements: doctor appointments, daycare water days, meetings at work, etc.
The goslings are longer and taller and gray, and a few have only wisps of green halos left of their original color and fuzz.
While I’ve done some reading and writing, part of the summer that I enjoy is a chance to watch more movies than during the school year. From this week:
Peter Greenaway rarely elicits indifference, though I bet some have slumbered off during one of those long tracking shots. His work produces a love or hate in the viewer, at least that’s been my experience.
I don’t think I’ve seen this in about 20 years, where I was introduced to it in a film class. Thank you, Dr. Hotchkiss! Part of the reason I hadn’t watched this again is that I can’t recreate the first time seeing it with a good friend in a film class. I believe this was the first Greenaway film we watched, and we both found it hilarious. Greenaway’s movies are generally gorgeous, but also full of the darkest, driest British wit. Part of our fun in watching The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) was due to my physical reactions to Michael Nyman’s score, which I detested at the time. I love his work now, but back then I was repulsed by minimalism like Philip Glass–it was tortuous. I would cringe every time the music started and my friend would laugh.
I like Greenaway’s films even more these days and even listen to Nyman on purpose.
Draughtsman’s is an art film, a period piece, a satire, and a murder mystery. And by art film I mean, yes, it eschews Hollywood traditions, but I also mean it is a film about art, and like other Greenaway films, it is full of allusions to the European tradition of painting and sculpture. As a trained painter, he also did all of the contracted drawings.
Another period piece by a divisive director I watched was A Field in England (2013) and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I want to watch it again and see how I feel about
the ending. The use of rope as a device and image in the film was really interesting to me, but I can’t quite put it into words. Something about the soul tethered to the body, the mind tethered to the brain. I don’t know. The rope and mushroom imagery, both related to the images of circles and rings, were fantastically used. The music, sometimes folksy, sometimes noisy, and the sound design were darkly enveloping. I really hope to see this in a theater some day.
Jane Campion, one of my favorite directors, has several short films on FilmStruck. I didn’t know these existed 
and all of them, so far, are funny, sometimes sad, and often both. “Passionless Moments” (1983) is a catalogue of small moments in the lives of very ordinary people. The situations are silly, but believable. A boy pretends the vegetables he’s carrying are a bomb that he has to get to his mom’s kitchen in order to defuse it. A man does yoga and has an epiphany–I think–of something fairly obvious. Speaking of Greenaway, this reminds me of some of his early work that uses lists and voiceover as organizing principles.
Also on FilmStruck is Francis Thompson’s short “N.Y., N.Y.” 
(1957). He didn’t make many films, but this is one of the best short films I’ve ever seen–and it has a great score. I’ve read that it took 13 years to make. I’ve read that it took 20. Either way, it was a long time in the making. Thompson directed very few films, mostly (if not all) shorts. This one uses kaleidoscopic lenses to an amazing effect. Again, one that I hope to see in a theater. There is an ok transfer on YouTube.
Stephen McClurg 